Non standard uses of IF

Abstract

The present study examines the semantic problems involved in computing the meaning of the non standard uses of if. The central question is whether or not it is necessary to introduce different meanings of if. Austin proposed two non standard meanings for if. We show that these can be accounted for by the standard meaning together with shifts in the position of the speech act within the sentence. These uses of if are among the 9 different non standard uses which we found in a sample of if sentences taken from the Brown University corpus: 1. Counterfactuah If E had stuck to his plan he'd still be famous. 2. Factual: If R was a liar, he was also a canny gentleman. 3. Conditional speech act: You may come back to Strasbourg, now, if you wish. 4. Performative speech act: He vowed vengence on L, if ever the chance came his way. 5. Noun clause: He wondered if the audience would let him finish. 6. Doubtful presupposition Perfect entities, if they move at all, don't move to 7. "'Restrictive Social relations impose courtesy, if not sympathy, 8. "'Concessive 9. Protasis only "If you want to see -" "Never mind", she said sternly. Each use was examined to see whether it could be accounted for by the standard meaning of if, together with other features of the sentence. Similar differences in usage should then be found with other SCs. This was the case for the first four uses. In three uses (6,7,8) if may/must occur in a phrase rather than in a full clause. The hypothesis that these uses can be derived from the standard meaning of if in an equivalent clause was explored and rejected. Two of these uses (6,7) require a material implication interpretation of if, also necessary for a few of the standard conditional sentences. Two uses (5,9) require only that the truth value of the following clause/phrase is unspecified. This is a property that all the uses have in common (with the exception of the factual use where the truth of the protasis is used to emphasise the truth of the apodosis) and is thus the feature that relates the different meanings of if. The standard use and the non standard uses using the standard meaning (1,2,3,4) require, in addition, that there is an inference relation from the protasis (the if sub clause) to the apodosis (the main clause in which the if clause is embedded). So we propose that three different meanings of if are required: inference (including the standard use), material implication (uses 6,7) and just doubting the truth value of the following proposition (uses 5,9). Each of these three uses may be expected to be translated by different words in other languages, e,g. in Dutch by als, zo and of (except for use 8) respectively.